How to Increase Your Newsletter Engagement Rate

Today, we're going to talk about how to increase your newsletter engagement. So what do we mean first by engagement rate, Neil?

Engagement rate is how many people are really reading your newsletter and interacting with it. Interaction could be responding to it and emailing you or clicking a link or buying something if you're promoting something. But if you're sending out an email, whether it's to 1 million people or 10 million people, if no one reads it, it doesn't matter.

Yeah. So the first thing I'll say is Neil, what Neil said at the very end, if nobody reads it, it doesn't matter. So the important thing is your email valuable, right? And what I mean by that is how do you get people to look forward to the next email? If your email is all, hey, buy my stuff or check out this product and you're trying to get affiliate commissions and you're just trying to make money where you are taking instead of giving, you gotta reverse that. So you gotta think about, okay, what, what is your give to take ratio? Maybe for every, every ask, you have 4 to 8 emails that are of value, but you gotta be thinking about how you can be entertaining too. You gotta, the key thing when you're writing an email is to think about how do you get them to, again, look forward to the next email, right? When you watch a movie or when you're watching a series, like I'm watching Loki right now, there's always a hook at the very end to keep you going. So how do you hook people at the very end? That's what you can do at, I think this is at a foundational level, right? Right. This seems like a duh statement, but most people tend to phone it in when they're thinking about their newsletter. When actuality, great newsletter businesses have been built. You look at Morning Brew, you look at The Hustle, they keep you on the hook and they're entertaining. Right. So how can you take an element of what they have going on? Because these are both 8-figure newsletter businesses and one sold to HubSpot. The other one sold to Business Insider. So think about that and I'll leave it to, I'll turn it over to Neil for maybe some tactical stuff.

Yeah. So from a tactical standpoint, If someone stops reading your emails or opening them up, stop sending emails to them because it'll cause majority of your newsletters to go into the spam box, even if people wanted to read them. So you need to scrub your list. You can do it either weekly or monthly. I do mine automatically on a daily basis. Some email providers will just do it for you. The other thing that I would do is test your subject lines to see what's working with open rates. The next thing I would end up doing is having people people respond to your emails, that really helps improve deliverability. So within your newsletter, ask a question, it'll encourage more responses. That adds way more people into address book and it really improves deliverability. But those are some of the things that I would test from a tactical standpoint. Another thing that I would test from a strategy standpoint is storytelling. I think storytelling's very important. Just think about movies. Eric mentioned about evoking curiosity and hooking people and figuring out, yeah, I want to know what's next. I got to read the next newsletter. But also storytelling really does hook people in and cause them to engage.

Yep. Other thing I'll say is personalization, obviously subject lines, and you can personalize the subject lines as well. So you can say Neil with a question mark on it. But you can also, when you think about if you're running like a customer data platform, you can customize the technology that they're using on their website. If you're sending outbound emails just to show that you actually have done a little research into them. And so just a little, you don't need to go too hardcore when you think about like a templated email. Now I'm thinking about outbound. Maybe 80% of it's a template, but maybe 10 to 20% of it is personalized and you're gonna get higher engagement rates there. I know we're talking about newsletter engagement rates, but the same concept applies. And so I think also sometimes you don't need to go too, you don't need to go too crazy. You can just, it can be like 9 words. We talked about the 9-word email from Dean Jackson before where you're asking a question, hey Neil, are you still interested in buying a yacht? Sometimes a question like that will get a lot of replies and The thing I'll say around replies also is when you are sending an introduction email to people asking a question, that's going to help you with deliverability because you're showing a high response rate at the end of the day. And Neil, what do you, what do you, I think you clean your list quite a bit, right? That's another thing. Yeah.

And I mentioned that in the tactics, I would just clean it on a monthly basis, worst case, ideally weekly, if not daily.

Cool. Anything else from your side?

That's it.

All right. marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E to learn about our virtual And our live events, they're cool. They're fun. Neil and I hanging out and other cool people too.